I Finally Looked at My Podcast Download Numbers 30 Days After Launch.. Here’s What They Said.

In the first interview I ever recorded for season 1 of Inside the Podcast Studio, with Travis Brown of Podcast Builder Club, Travis & I discussed download numbers — what do they mean, why they’re not especially relevant, what other metrics are more important etc.. and in that discussion he challenged me, for the first 30 days after launching this show — don’t look at my download numbers. At all. And so I didn’t. Until now.

In those blissful 30 days I created content, engaged with listeners on social media, got some feedback via DM’s & was just totally unaware of how many people were actually listening to the podcast. Which in turn allowed me to create the content I wanted to make without being biased in any way, and what I realised through doing that is constantly looking at your podcast analytics kind’ve messes with you.

With my other show, the Coffee & Coding Podcast, I would check pretty much every day. If an episode got lower than average listens I’d start wondering if that was because the title wasn’t any good, or the content was poor, or maybe my listeners don’t like to listen to episodes about that sort of content etc.. I’d start questioning all of these things based on a single number which, when you step back, doesn’t actually give you a whole lot of info.

However — 30 days into the new show, I finally looked at the numbers. So here they are — in month 1 I got… *drumroll* … 171 listeners. Not downloads — listeners.

Now I use Sounder.fm for this show, which unlike my favourite podcast host Buzzsprout which only gives you the download number, Sounder.fm gives you a breakdown of streams & listeners. Streams from what their docs say are how many time an episode was downloaded in a 45 minute period, whereas listeners are how many unique listeners listened to an episode. So from what I gather you may have 7 streams but they could all be the same listener — so I’m gonna focus on the listener count.

Now 171 listeners for month 1 is… pretty awesome if you ask me. Especially when you consider I started the podcast totally fresh so none of those listeners (bar me & my partner) were people I knew. The only way anyone would find the show would be via the new Instagram account I created for the show (where I’ve been consistently posting content to promote the show) OR from my guests sharing the episode and bringing their audience to the show.

Another interesting stat from Apple Podcasts is that there’s 1 episode where people started listening and then 50% of them dropped off in the first 2 minutes. Now that might sound like a problem but, the first 2 minutes is me introducing what the episode is about, and the 50% of people who didn’t drop off stayed for the entire episode. Which tells me half the listeners decided that episode wasn’t for them, but the half who decided it was for them listened to it all. To me, that is great engagement — you can’t please everyone all the time!

So that’s my download report for month 1. I’m thinking about trying some difference marketing tactics now that I have a baseline of “organic” reach, so I’ll report back in 30 days time to update you where the show is at then.

In the meantime.. Feedback? Was this information useful to you? Are you obsessed with looking at your podcast download numbers? Let me know in the comments!